Accretion onto a Kerr black hole in the presence of a dipole magnetic field

Abstract

We analyze the accretion of charged matter onto a rotating black hole immersed in an aligned dipolar magnetic field. We specialize to motion in the equatorial plane and calculate the 'Keplerian' angular momentum distribution, the marginally stable and marginally bound orbits, and the efficiency of mass-to-energy conversion as functions of the angular momentum of the black hole and of the product of the dipole moment and the charge of the infalling matter. Although the detailed results are quite different from those previously obtained in the case of an uniform magnetic field, the astrophysically relevant results are very similar; when hydrodynamical accretion is considered, these effects of the magnetic field are always very small. But for test particles the efficiency can be significantly increased for limited ranges of the parameters.